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A Farm Hotel Opens on the Swedish Island of Gotland
By Anton Nilsson
On the southern tip of Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea, a stylish new hotel is serving extravagant dinners made with local produce. Sibbjäns, which opened earlier this month, is an 1870s farm that was restored and expanded to accommodate nine modern hotel rooms and 13 more rustic farmstead quarters with shared bathrooms. New buildings were constructed using traditional methods to match the old structures: limestone was stacked by hand and beams were hewed by broadax. “When the time came to lay the roof, almost a hundred people from the community came and helped thatch it with sedge harvested down by the sea,” says the Sibbjäns co-owner Jonas Nordlander. The hotel bar overlooks a natural pool, and guests can borrow bicycles to explore the surrounding wooded trails. The property’s working farm provides most of the vegetables, herbs and meat used at the restaurant (a set menu might include ricotta and broad bean-filled agnolotti and grilled lamb with leeks). To Swedes, Gotland is known as a holiday destination, famous for its long stretches of beaches with limestone sea stacks, annual medieval festival and summertime party scene in the island’s largest town, Visby. Others who’ve heard of the place might know it as the region in which director Ingmar Bergman lived, worked and died. (The smaller island of Fårö, located just off the northern end of Gotland, hosts an annual Bergman festival in his memory.) Visby, which is surrounded by a largely intact 13th-century defensive wall, is accessible by flight or ferry from the Swedish mainland. From there, Sibbjäns is about an hour’s drive south. From about $280 a night, sibbjans.se.
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Ari’s, a New All-Day Restaurant in Berlin, Is Inspired by the American Diner
By Gisela Williams
While the Berlin-based Peruvian chef Arianna Plevisani was working at Olafur Eliasson’s studio kitchen and the restaurant at the art-filled Château Royal hotel in Mitte, she was dreaming about founding her own place. Growing up in Lima with restaurateur parents, Plevisani attended an American school. “I always coveted food like Doritos and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I didn’t get at home,” she says. She’s channeled those cravings into Ari’s, an American luncheonette with Peruvian influences that opened earlier this month in a former mechanics garage hidden in a back courtyard in Berlin’s Kreuzkölln neighborhood. Inside, salmon-hued banquettes and red concrete floors brighten up the white-walled space. Highlights from Plevisani’s menu include the spicy green goddess salad (an iceberg wedge drizzled with a creamy tarragon dressing and Plevisani’s homemade crispy chili), as well as the Lima Kreuzburger, a smash burger served with ají amarillo sauce and shoestring fries. Among the drinks are a spicy mezcalita and, true to her diner inspiration, free refills of American-style brewed coffee. arisberlin.com.
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An Exhibition of South Asian Artists in Jaipur’s City Palace
By Sarah Khan
When the Jaipur Centre for Art opened at the 18th-century City Palace in Jaipur, India, last fall, its co-founders, Maharajah Sawai Padmanabh Singh and the Jaipur-based American curator Noelle Kadar, exhibited works from major artists including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anish Kapoor, Sean Scully and Dayanita Singh. Around the same time, halfway across the world in Los Angeles, the gallerist Rajiv Menon was preparing to open Rajiv Menon Contemporary with the aim of showcasing artists from across the South Asian diaspora. Next month, the two galleries are planning a cross-continental collaboration as Menon brings “Non-Residency,” a group exhibition of South Asian artists who live around the world, to the JCA. “He’s starting out and taking risks, and we’re starting out and taking risks,” says Kadar. Menon selected pieces by 16 artists who, he says, “navigate that gulf between diaspora and homeland culture.” They include the New York-based painter and textile artist Melissa Joseph, who will show in India for the first time, and the San Francisco-based Anoushka Mirchandani, who has already had solo exhibitions in India. Two of the artists, New York-based Maya Varadaraj and Nibha Akireddy, from San Francisco, will stay on for a residency at JCA to explore the city’s craft traditions through their work. “Non-Residency” will be on view from Aug. 9 through Sept. 8, jaipurcentreforart.com.
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Silk Clothes and Stone Furniture at a New Gallery in the South of France
By Gisela Williams
For much of the last two decades, the Turkish-born design consultant Yelda Bayraktar was based in Africa, where she lived in various countries and connected artisans to international museums, galleries and collectors. Five years ago, she moved to Arles, France, with her artist and designer husband, Porky Hefer, and she turned that same eye for exceptional craftsmanship to Europe. This summer she opened Couthure, a gallery and boutique in downtown Arles where she sells limited-edition clothing (only 10 of each item) that she designs with fabrics sourced from small producers such as the Italian silk weaving company Taroni and a family in the Italian province of Vercelli that creates wool fabric with hand-operated looms. The shapes — such as a loose double breasted jacket and a belted short sleeve dress — will stay the same even as the fabrics rotate. Their palette, says Bayraktar, is inspired by Arles: the “shifting color of the Rhône river and the pastels of the sunrise here.” Her inaugural collection was in pale pink, ecru and green; the next one is slated to be light caramel and tones of greens and yellows. Couthure also sells limited edition objects from designers in Bayraktar’s orbit, including her husband). Next month, the space will feature a series of onyx lights, carved by the Italian designer Victoria Episcopo to resemble planets. From about $2,400 for a dress, instagram.com/couthure.arles.
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Chefs Are Experimenting With Seasoned Butter
By Mahira Rivers
When Ali Saboor was a young boy in Tehran, a meal of kebab and rice topped with a golden egg yolk was a Friday treat. “For extra richness and flavor, you would mix the yolk, some butter and sumac with the rice,” he says. At his restaurant Eyval in Brooklyn, Saboor translates these memories into beef and lamb koobideh topped by butter flavored with tomato paste, tomato powder and sumac. It is, essentially, a compound butter, using the technique of mixing herbs and spices into tempered butter that was popularized in French kitchens. Today, chefs like Saboor are experimenting with a wide variety of spices to make their seasoned butters. “It’s a great vehicle for flavor,” says Trigg Brown, who combines butter with Taiwanese bean paste for dishes like chicken wontons with morels at his restaurant Win Son in Brooklyn. At Adda in the East Village, the chef Chintan Pandya infuses hand-churned butter with spices like fenugreek and smoked chili for the restaurant’s butter chicken. The chefs Alan Hsu and Sarah Cooper turn crab scraps into an umami-packed butter at Sun Moon Studio in Oakland, Calif. At Mérito in Lima, Peru, the chef Juan Luis Martínez fortifies butter with chicha de jora, a pre-Colombian fermented corn beverage, which is served with glazed pork belly and arepas. And at the restaurant Soul in Seoul, South Korea, rice cakes are served with three butters in flavors like black sesame, onion and seaweed.
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